In Plain Sight: What We Miss When Talking About Student Trauma

If a tree falls in the woods…no, wait. If a student experiences a traumatic event but no adult authority figure acknowledges it, does that event have adverse affects? Always, the research says.

And that has been my experience too.

The ACEs study(Adverse Childhood Experiences) has documented that traumas in childhood predictably alter the quality of a person’s life later on (increased risks for major diseases, cancer, substance abuse, and other self-harming behaviors). Most people have a least a score of 1 on the ACEs scale of 1–10. Divorce, for example, counts as 1. After 6 ACEs, your life expectancy decreases.

Rut-roh.

Unless…

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its’ own way, so Tolstoy tells us inAnna Karenina. For 12 years, I worked in a last-chance high school full of students who wore trauma around their necks in the form of placards of friends and family…